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Refugees trapped in intolerable home in ‘sanctuary city’: Fiorito

There is a family of refugees — a mother, a father and three kids — living in a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a small apartment building.

The place is a slum.

Worse than that, during the recent heavy rains the toilets backed up and the bathtubs filled with sewage and overflowed, flooding all the ground-floor apartments. I repeat: there was sewage in the bathtubs, and the toilets overflowed

No camera can capture that smell.

I will not tell you who this family is, or where they live, nor will I tell you where they are from; I will simply say they are helpless before their landlord.

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There ought to be a law.

Actually, there are plenty of laws but when you are a refugee, waiting for your appeal to be determined, fear trumps the law and evil amplifies fear

When I asked the man if I could use his name and tell his story, he pointed to his chest and made a motion with his hand, as if to brush himself away.

He said, “Out, out; landlord.”

After some back and forth, I understood him to mean that the landlord threatened to have them kicked out of the house, and out of the country, if he complained too loudly.

This, I remind you, is Canada.

Oh, Canada, where a landlord can demand $800 a month for an apartment filled with sewage.

When the tenant called the landlord to ask for help, the landlord is reported to have told the man to something off; something, in this case, rhymes with truck.

The families on the ground floor of the building mopped up the sewage on their own, but some of them have moved out until the smell disappears completely.

I can tell you the smell still lingers, and the toilets still don’t work properly.

Neighbours of the refugee family called the city on their behalf, to try and get help. Inspectors came to visit, and they issued a work order; that’s good.

The date of compliance?

Next month.

Could you live like that?

The tenant showed me around his place. The problems include more than sewage. In the kitchen, he pointed to his cupboards and opened the doors. They were spotless. He said, “Cockroach, too much.” The cockroaches come out at night, and then they are an army.

He opened the cabinet under the sink. “This, no good.” There was a bucket under the drainpipe because there is a leak the landlord will not fix.

He showed me the bedroom, and pointed to one of the beds. “This? Bedbug. Full. All changed. Too much money.” Translation?

He has had to replace the beds — and all the other furniture — and he can’t afford to keep doing so.

And then he introduced me to his son, and he rolled up his son’s sleeve, and on his boy’s forearm there were bites. No translation necessary.

He pointed to the front window of the bedroom, and then pointed to the floor. The floor was sagging; worse, when he stood near the window, the floor and the wall parted by an inch.

“Come,” he said, and he led me a vacant apartment at the back of the building. There, in the corner, the floor sagged so badly that you could see a two-inch gap between the floor and the baseboard.

“Come,” he said again, and he led me the basement. But before he opened the door, he made a gesture with his sweater, hiking it up over his nose.

I understood.

In the basement, near the water heaters, I saw a puddle an inch deep and ten feet across. He said, “Water, s--t, problem.”

No kidding.

We went back upstairs, not a moment too soon. Back in the kitchen he said, as if he had forgotten, “House? Mice. Big.” He held his hands a foot apart. Those were not mice, they were rats. He said, “My girls, sleeping, problem.”

When I asked him again, carefully, one word at a time, that I wanted to tell his story in the paper, he repeated what he had said before.

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